The A-list fitness trainer: meet Mr Bodyism

What do Lara Stone, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and countless other body
beautifuls have in common? They’ve all been reshaped – and reprogrammed – by
James Duigan

James Duigan: 'We set out to remind people that they deserve a happy, healthy life'Photo: ANNA HUIX

By Anna Murphy

7:00AM GMT 05 Jan 2014

In my experience, the male celebrity fitness trainer, as a genre, tends to fit the X-Man mould: lean, mean, a tiny bit scary, they intimidate you into working-out hard.

Which is why it is only halfway through my third training session at Bodyism– the most celebrity-bedecked gym in London, at the super-swanky Bulgari Hotel – that I realise the chatty, twinkly-eyed man making me doing strange things with an oversized elastic band is, on this occasion, Mr Bodyism himself.

James Duigan (pronounced “Dye-gun”) is a child’s body flipbook made manifest, his head not quite the match to his body. On top of his superhero physique sits the gentle, smiley face of someone who is far too, well, nice, to save the world. Or is he? Here he is nice-ing me into a more than usually vigorous work-out. “Soft power” in action.

That the 39-year-old Duigan is the hottest fitness property in town is incontrovertible: the models Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Lara Stone are just two of the body beautifuls he helps to burnish.

He is also the man behind the bestselling Clean & Lean Diet, which argues convincingly that the best way to lose body fat is to detoxify your diet, not only by cutting out “bad” carbs and processed foods (white flour and sugar begone) but by eating as organically as possible. (Fat cells are a safe place for the body to store toxins, argues Duigan: lose the toxins and you lose the fat.)

Over a Clean & Lean breakfast of smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and avocado several weeks (and sessions) later, Duigan tells me that saving the world, one toned torso at a time, is in fact part of the game plan for him and his 20-strong Bodyism team.

“In the books, and here at the gym, we set out to remind people that they deserve a happy, healthy life. So few people actually think about that, or believe it. Until you believe it, it’s always going to be a struggle to change because you are going to sabotage yourself. Any transformation that happens in your body, happens in your mind first. Without that it doesn’t happen or it doesn’t last. The minute you change the mindset it becomes so easy.”

If Duigan sounds like a bit of a “hippy” (his word), that is because he unashamedly is. But he manifests a decidedly unhippy-ish rigour in his approach to transforming people’s bodies, and lives. Firstly, there is the data.

“The first thing we do with a client is a really good assessment. If you don’t assess, you guess. This tells us exactly what is going on with someone’s body. Stress, muscle imbalances. You can read a lot from where the body deposits fat. Fat on the tummy indicates emotional or nutritional stress for example.

"Fat on the back of the arm can mean toxicity from heavy metal or plastics or hormones or poor food.” Of interest to Duigan too is everything from your bedtime (10.30pm at the latest in Bodyism land) to whether or not you have – apologies – “a daily poo. It’s. Important.” Your body can let the cat out of the bag on all this and more.

Then there is the work-out itself. What first strikes someone new to the Bodyism approach is that up to 20 minutes of the hour-long session is spent warming up, or, as Duigan puts it, “in movement prep”. This is a series of low-impact stretches, squats and the like. Not particularly challenging but, according to Duigan, key to the programme’s success.

“We prepare your body, switching on the right muscles so that they fire at the right time. It is designed to get the whole body working right. It is a simple thing to do, but it is part of the kind of magic that goes on.’’

I can certainly vouch for its efficacy. Take the famously non-collaborative female derrière, for example; under the Bodyism spotlight it really does lift and tone.

“We spend a lot of time switching on the butt. Often, especially in women, the butt goes missing in the kinetic chain. So you get tight hamstrings or lower back pain because the butt isn’t working. So we avoid that, and then you get a great aesthetic effect because it also lifts and tones.”

The other surprising aspect to a Bodyism session is that there is comparatively little high-intensity exercise, no more than a few minutes at full pelt on the cross-trainer or bike or the horrific Versaclimber (don’t ask), at intervals over the hour.

“Often what happens is people run themselves fat. They run or exercise so much that they raise their cortisol levels and this then dumps fat on their stomach.”

By adopting so-called high-intensity interval training, or HIIT – the short, sharp shock of the exercise world – you get all of the benefits of aerobic exercises without raising your cortisol. (For women another benefit of HIIT is that it raises levels of testosterone, which decline as you age, which in turn nukes the dread bingo wings.)

“It is about changing the mindset. Working with someone’s body, not against it. You can’t hammer your body into shape. You have got to work with it to mould it,” explains Duigan.

In this, he speaks from personal experience. “When I was in my twenties I exercised and trained and I was always sore or busted up or exhausted. And one day I thought, ‘When is the pay-off? When am I actually going to feel good from this?’ So I changed everything, started exercising for enjoyment, started yoga, and I have never felt fitter or stronger or healthier. It is about focusing on why you are doing something – to change your life, to improve your experience of the world. That is what we do with our clients.”

Duigan’s own experience also lies at the heart of his impressively passionate and informed approach to diet. He tells me that every single one of the clients who comes to him has, to a greater or lesser degree, some sort of issue around food, men as well as women. “We all have an emotional relationship with food. It sustains us. With people it is never about, ‘Just eat less.’ There are some deep beliefs there from stuff that has happened.’’

What does he see most commonly? “Shame and guilt. ‘I shouldn’t be having this.’ ‘Ugh, I feel guilty now.’ People will joke about it, but there is a huge amount of shame and guilt around food.”

Duigan’s relationship with food was, in the past, more fraught than most. His childhood in Australia was “wonderful”, he tells me, but “my parents didn’t have much money, so hunger was real. And when there was food, I would have to eat everything. It was like I was eating for the last time. Because I never really knew where the next meal was coming from.”

Cut to the age of 21 and Duigan was in London, sofa-surfing and working odd jobs. Again the hunger reappeared. “I ended up a bit homeless. I used to have to wait for Starbucks to throw their sandwiches out. It was horrible. That hunger sucks. It’s the worst.”

His “semi-vagrant years” ended when he got a job on reception at the Harbour Club, the late Diana, Princess of Wales’s gym and, at the time, “the fanciest place in London”. He studied “anatomy, physiology, nutrition, anything I could” in the evenings and began working there as a trainer.

“I started to develop a good reputation, um, for, kind of, helping people.” Eventually he branched out on his own. “I had a little room with a broken dumb-bell in the corner. I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ ” Pretty soon the answer to that question was, training Elle Macpherson, just one of his impressively A-list early-adopters.

Although Duigan’s fitness habit ensured he was never overweight, his eating remained out of control well after the hungry years were over. “It took me a long time to figure out that I was still being told by the little kid in my head there wasn’t enough food, and you had to eat it while you could. I used to eat until I felt sick. That has really shaped the way I deal with clients.”’

Not surprising, then, that Duigan’s Clean & Lean Diet has a psychological as well as practical dimension. Somehow – and I don’t know quite how he does it – the book manages to make you feel that a “treat” is not a packet of crisps or bar of chocolate, but something that your body (as opposed to your head) actually likes.

And then, a couple of weeks in, you start to feel so darn good that you go off whatever your nutritional nemesis is altogether. It is a game-changing shift in thinking for many people, and does indeed seem akin to the “magic” of which Duigan occasionally talks.

“Yes, people buy my books because they want to lose weight,” he continues, but the letters he receives often suggest a more fundamental change has taken place. “People write and say, ‘I never understood I had a relationship with food, and now that I do I can see what is driving these things, and why I have been sabotaging myself.’ ”

Part of the new relationship with food that Duigan advocates is actually to enjoy being naughty on occasion; to have your cake and not feel guilty about it afterwards. (Duigan’s Brazilian wife, Christiane, with whom he has a one-year-old daughter, “would NEVER give up her cake”, he says with a laugh.) “When you feel guilty you get into this spiral. ‘Oh f— it, I’m going to have a biscuit.’ Whereas if you just own it, then you say, ‘OK, I had croissant. Now I am going to have scrambled eggs,’ fine. Don’t make yourself wrong. It takes away your power.

“We want to change people’s lives,” Duigan asserts, one more time, smiling yet somehow steely, every inch the X-Man, after all. “People are very rarely listened to, and we have made a commitment to listen. We are in the relationship business. Not the lunge business.”